Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Page 3
Encino Attorney Receives Lifetime Achievement Award
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The California Workers’ Compensation Defense Attorneys’ Association has presented Encino attorney Barry S. Pearlman with the association’s Warren L. Hanna Lifetime Achievement Award.
The CWCDAA, founded in 1979, is a federation of California attorneys engaged in workers’ compensation law on behalf of employers and insurance companies which presents the award annually to a member attorney for a lifetime commitment to the association, the workers’ compensation community, and to California employers and their insurance companies, the association said. It is named for the late Warren L. Hanna of Hanna, Brophy, MacLean, McAleer & Jensen, LLP, a prominent author on workers’ compensation law.
This year’s award was presented Friday, and Pearlman, managing partner of Pearlman, Borska & Wax, said yesterday he was “touched and honored” to receive it. “I’m still a little numb and awestruck that this happened,” he told the MetNews.
He said he was “humbled” by the fact that some past recipients of the award were his mentors, including the first-ever recipient of the award, the late Gerald M. Kennedy of Hanna Brophy. “To be placed anywhere near a category with them,” Pearlman said, “is an accomplishment that I could not have foreseen.”
Among his major accomplishments in his career, Pearlman said his firm recently was successful in having a state law which ordered employers to pay workers’ compensation benefits to the non-dependent heirs of a deceased employee declared unconstitutional.
“Something like that hasn’t happened in at least 75 years,” he said, adding that the case would “save employers throughout the state substantial sums of money.”
Zachary H. Sacks, a member of the WCDAA board of directors and previous award recipient, presented the award. He commended Pearlman for “always represent[ing] the entire defense attorney community in the best light” with “with dignity and skill.”
Sacks praised Pearlman’s “boundless character,” former service as president of the association, as well as of its southern California division, and input to numerous different advisory panels including the Governor’s Workers’ Compensation Community Task Force and the administrative drector’s advisory committees on Permanent Disability and Medical Provider Networks, summing up with:
“He is a fine, fine man.”
Copyright 2008, Metropolitan News Company